make better feedback cycles

When I was writing a book, I was also teaching a course based on the book. I built this little app that helped me organize, navigate and edit the book’s content quickly. When something didn’t make sense to a student, I could make changes to the book in realtime. A lot of the success of that book came from the speed of that feedback cycle.

I realized that this idea of making better feedback cycles was an effective tool for most things in life. It was the same thing when I ran a company. We would build new software products for clients and the successful ones all had one thing in common: they established feedback cycles with customers as early as possible.

My approach is to get at least a few users using something in their environment. It doesn’t have to be anything close to the final product, but it needs to offer enough value that they actually use it. If they aren’t using it, then you aren’t meaningfully solving a problem of theirs. If they say, “Yeah, but I wish it did this…”, then you’ve started the feedback cycle.